One Year Later: Secretary Pete Hegseth Has Restored the Pentagon’s Warfighting Focus

James Fitzpatrick | January 25

One year ago, the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War, and with that vote, the Department of War began a long-overdue course correction. In the twelve months since, under the leadership of President Donald Trump and Secretary Hegseth, the Pentagon shed the ideological baggage that weighed down readiness and morale and returned to its core principles: merit, discipline, lethality, and victory.

During the Biden Administration, the military had been pulled away from its core mission by politicized social experiments masquerading as progress. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracies metastasized across the services, injecting race, sex, and ideology into decisions that should have been governed by performance and character alone. That era ended decisively in 2025.

The turning point came early. On January 27, President Trump signed a landmark executive order restoring a merit-based, apolitical military. The order banned race- and sex-based preferences in personnel decisions, abolished DEI offices, and mandated a full review of service academy curricula to purge radical ideological content. It was a clear signal: the United States military exists to deter and win wars, not to serve as a laboratory for social engineering.

Secretary Hegseth wasted no time executing that mandate. He issued a department-wide directive eliminating DEI offices and initiatives throughout the Pentagon and established a task force to ensure compliance across every installation and command. The result was not chaos, as critics warned, but clarity. Standards were unified. Expectations were reset. Identity politics gave way to shared purpose.

Perhaps the most consequential reforms came in personnel and education. Under Hegseth’s leadership, DEI-driven practices, such as quotas, race-based considerations, and ideological screening, were formally prohibited in promotions, assignments, and service academy admissions. Advancement once again turned on merit, operational need, and performance. By restoring rigor and fairness at institutions like West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy, the Department rebuilt trust that future officers are selected because they can lead and fight, not because they check a demographic box.

This cultural reorientation was made unmistakably clear at a gathering of senior commanders at Marine Corps Base Quantico. Standing alongside President Trump, Secretary Hegseth delivered a blunt message: political correctness would no longer define leadership. Fitness, ability, character, and warfighting excellence would. Those unwilling to make that shift were invited to step aside. It was not rhetoric for the cameras. It was a directive that translated into higher physical standards, restored accountability, and renewed focus on readiness across the force.

Hegseth’s first year also demonstrated a willingness to confront symbolic and cultural drift head-on. He ordered the reinstatement of the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, rejecting the fashionable impulse to erase history in favor of honoring it honestly and fully. He supported renaming naval assets that had become vehicles for politicized messaging, reaffirming that ships should inspire warrior ethos, not ideological signaling. He backed the removal of DEI materials from military libraries and academies, ensuring that professional military education serves combat leadership, not activism.

Accountability returned to command as well. When senior leaders blurred the line between warfighting and cultural performance, such as allowing drag shows aboard an operational aircraft carrier, the Department made clear that such decisions have consequences. Promotions are no longer automatic rewards for time served.

Secretary Hegseth also took difficult but necessary steps to refocus military medicine on readiness, ending taxpayer-funded gender-transition procedures that sidelined service members for months or years and imposed significant costs on units and the public alike. The decision was rooted not in animus, but in a sober assessment of mission impact and resource stewardship, exactly the kind of leadership the Pentagon had been missing.

The common thread through all of these actions is resolve. For too long, senior leaders acknowledged problems in private while accommodating them in practice. Hegseth did the opposite. He named the problem, acted decisively, and accepted the inevitable criticism that comes with real reform.

One year in, the results are clear. The Department of War is more focused, more disciplined, and more honest about its purpose than it has been in decades. The message to service members is simple and empowering: excellence is the standard, merit is the measure, and the mission comes first.

Anniversaries are a time for reflection, but also for resolve. Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first year has shown what is possible when civilian leadership has the courage to reject ideological fashion and recommit the military to what it exists to do. If this first year is any indication, America’s fighting force is once again being shaped for victory, not virtue signaling, and that is something worth celebrating.

James Fitzpatrick is an Army veteran, a former appointee in the Trump 45 administration, and Director of the Center to Advance Security in America